Ten Novels And Their Authors (16 page)

Balzac’s contemporaries are agreed that at this time he was ingenuous, childish, kindly and genial. George Sand
wrote that he was sincere to the point of modesty, boastful to the point of braggadocio, confident, expansive, very good and quite crazy, drunk on water, intemperate in work and sober in other passions, equally matter-of-fact and romantic, credulous and sceptical, puzzling and contrary. He was not a good talker. He was not quick in the uptake, and he had no gift of repartee; his conversation was neither allusive nor ironical; but as a monologuist his verve was irresistible. He roared with laughter at what he was going to say, and everybody laughed with him. They laughed to listen to him, and they laughed to look at him; André Billy says that the phrase, ‘he burst out laughing’, might have been invented for him.

The best life of Balzac has been written by André Billy, and it is from his admirable book that I have gained the information which I now propose to impart to the reader. The novelist’s real name was Balssa, and his ancestors were farm-labourers and weavers; but his father, who started life as clerk to an attorney, having after the Revolution come up in the world changed his name to Balzac. At the age of fifty-one he married the daughter of a draper who had made a fortune by government contracts, and Honoré, the eldest of his four children, was born in 1799 at Tours, where his father was administrator of the hospital. He had presumably got the job because Madame Balzac’s father, the ex-draper, had somehow become director-general of the Paris hospitals. Honoré appears to have been idle and troublesome at school. At the end of 1814 his father was put in charge of the catering to a division of the army in Paris and moved there with his family. It was decided that Honoré should become an attorney and, after passing the necessary examinations, he entered the office of a certain Maître Guyonnet. How he got on there is pretty well indicated by a note sent him one morning by the head clerk: ‘Monsieur Balzac is requested not to come to the office to-day, as there is a lot of work.’ In 1819 his father was retired on a pension and decided to
live in the country. He settled down at Villeparisis, a village on the road to Meaux. Honoré stayed in Paris, since it had been decided that a friend of the family, a lawyer, should hand over his business to him when, after a few years of practice, he was competent to deal with it.

But Honoré rebelled. He wanted to be a writer. He insisted on being a writer. There were violent family scenes; but at last, notwithstanding the continuous opposition of his mother, a severe and practical woman whom he never liked, his father yielded so far as to give him a chance. It was arranged that he should have two years to see what he could do. He installed himself in an attic at sixty francs a year, and furnished it with a table, two chairs, a bed, a wardrobe and an empty bottle to serve as a candlestick. He was twenty. Free.

The first thing he did was to write a tragedy; and when his sister was about to be married and he went home, he took his play with him. He read it to the assembled family and two of their friends. All agreed that it was worthless. It was then sent to a professor, whose verdict was that the author should do whatever else he liked, but not write. Balzac, angry and discouraged, went back to Paris. He decided that, since he could not be a tragic poet, he would be a novelist, and he wrote two or three novels inspired by those of Walter Scott, Anne Radcliffe and Maturin. But his parents had come to the conclusion that the experiment had failed, and they ordered him to come back to Villeparisis by the first stage-coach. Presently a friend, a hack writer whose acquaintance Balzac had made in the Latin Quarter, came to see him and suggested that they should write a novel in collaboration. So began a long series of potboilers which he wrote sometimes alone, sometimes in collaboration, under various pseudonyms. No one knows how many books he turned out between 1821 and 1825. Some authorities claim as many as fifty. I don’t know that anyone has read them in quantity except George Saintsbury, and he acknowledges that it required
an effort. They were for the most part historical, for then Walter Scott was at the height of his fame and they were designed to cash in on his great vogue. They were very bad, but they had their use in teaching Balzac the value of swift action to hold the reader’s attention, and the value of dealing with the subjects that people regard as of primary importance – love, wealth, honour and life. It may be that they taught him, too, what his own proclivities must also have suggested to him, that to be read the author must concern himself with passion. Passion may be base, trivial or unnatural, but, if violent enough, is not without some trace of grandeur.

While thus engaged, Balzac lived at home. There he made the acquaintance of a neighbour, a Madame de Berny, the daughter of a German musician who had been in the service of Marie Antoinette and of one of her maids. She was forty-five. Her husband was sick and querulous; she had had, however, six children by him, besides one by a lover. She became Balzac’s friend, then his mistress, and remained devoted to him till her death fourteen years later. It was a curious relation. He loved her as a lover, but he transferred to her, besides, the love he had never felt for his mother. She was not only a mistress, but a confidant, whose advice, encouragement and disinterested affection were always his for the asking. The affair gave rise to scandal in the village, and Madame Balzac, as was natural, highly disapproved of her son’s entanglement with a woman old enough to be his mother. His books, moreover, brought in little money, and she was concerned about his future. An acquaintance suggested that he should go into business, and the idea seems to have appealed to him. Madame de Berny put up forty-five thousand francs, and with a couple of partners he became a publisher, a printer and a type-founder. He was a poor business man and wildly extravagant. He charged up to the firm his personal expenditure with jewellers, tailors, bootmakers, and even laundresses. At the end of
three years the firm went into liquidation, and his mother had to provide fifty thousand francs in order to pay his creditors.

Since money played so large a part in Balzac’s existence, it is worth while to consider what these sums really amounted to. Fifty thousand francs was two thousand pounds, but two thousand pounds then was worth far, far more than it is worth now. It is difficult to say how much. Perhaps the best way is to state what at that time could be done on a certain number of francs. The Rastignacs were gentry. The family, consisting of six persons, lived in the provinces, thriftily, but according to their station with decency, on three thousand francs a year. When they sent their eldest son, Eugène, to Paris to study law, he took a room in the pension of Madame Vauquer and paid forty-five francs a month for board and lodging. Several young men had rooms out, but came in for their meals, since the house had a reputation for good food, and for this they paid thirty francs a month. Board and lodging to-day in an establishment of the same class as Madame Vauquer’s would cost at least thirty-five thousand francs a month. The fifty thousand francs that Balzac’s mother paid to save him from bankruptcy would be equivalent now to a very considerable sum.

The experience, though disastrous, provided him with a good deal of special information and a knowledge of business which were useful to him in the novels he afterwards wrote.

After the crash, Balzac went to stay with friends in Brittany, and there found the material for a novel,
Les Chouans
, which was his first serious work, and the first which he signed with his own name. He was thirty. From then on, he wrote with frenzied industry till his death twenty-one years later. The number of his works is astounding. Every year produced one or two long novels, and a dozen novelettes and short stories. Besides this, he wrote a number of plays, some of which were never
accepted, and, of those that were, all, with one exception, lamentably failed. At least once, for a short period, he conducted a newspaper, most of which he wrote himself. When at work, he led a chaste and regular life. He went to bed soon after his evening meal, and was awakened by his servant at one. He got up, put on his white robe, immaculate, for he claimed that to write one should be clad in garments without spot or stain; and then by candle-light, fortifying himself with cup after cup of black coffee, wrote with a quill from a raven’s wing. He stopped writing at seven, took a bath (in principle) and lay down. Between eight and nine his publisher came to bring him proofs, or get a piece of manuscript from him; then he set to work again till noon, when he ate boiled eggs, drank water and had more coffee; he worked till six, when he had his light dinner, which he washed down with a little Vouvray. Sometimes a friend or two would drop in, but after a little conversation, he went to bed. Though when alone he was thus abstemious, in company he ate voraciously. One of Balzac’s publishers declares that at one meal he saw him devour a hundred oysters, twelve cutlets, a duck, a brace of partridges, a sole, a number of sweets and a dozen pears. It is not surprising that in time he became very fat and his belly enormous. Gavarni says that he ate like a hog. His table manners were certainly inelegant: that he used a knife to eat with, in preference to a fork, does not offend me – I have no doubt that Louis XIV did, too; but I recoil at Balzac’s habit of blowing his nose in his napkin.

He was a great note-taker. Wherever he went he had his notebook with him, and when he happened upon something that might be useful to him, hit upon an idea of his own or was taken with someone else’s, he jotted it down. When possible, he visited the scene of his stories, and sometimes drove long distances to see a street or a house that he wished to describe. He chose the names of his characters with care, for he had a notion that the name
should correspond with the personality and appearance of the individual who bore it. It is generally conceded that he wrote badly. George Saintsbury thought this was owing to the fact that for ten years he had written, post-haste, a mass of novels just to make a bare living. That does not convince me. Balzac was a vulgar man (but was not his vulgarity an integral part of his genius?) and his prose was vulgar. It was prolix, portentous and too often incorrect. Emile Faguet, a critic, in his time, of importance, has given in his book on Balzac a whole chapter to the faults of taste, style, syntax and language of which the author was guilty; and, indeed, some of them are so gross that it needs no profound knowledge of French to perceive them. Balzac had no feeling for the elegance of his native tongue. It can never have occurred to him that prose may have a comeliness and a grace as delightful in its different way as verse. But for all that, when his exuberant volubility did not run away with him, he could give succinct and pithy expression to the apophthegms and maxims that are scattered about his novels. Neither in their matter nor in their manner would they have dishonoured La Rochefoucauld.

Balzac was not a writer who knew what he wanted to say from the start. He began with a rough draft, which he re-wrote and corrected so drastically that the manuscript which he finally sent to the printers was almost impossible to decipher. The proof was returned to him, and this he treated as if it were but an outline of the projected work. He not only added words, he added sentences, not only sentences but paragraphs, and not only paragraphs but chapters. When his proofs were once more set up, with all the alterations and corrections he had made, and a fair set delivered to him, he went to work on them again and made more changes. Only after this would he consent to publication, and then only on condition that in a future edition he should be allowed to make further
revisions. The expense of all this was great, and resulted in constant quarrels with his publishers.

The story of Balzac’s relations with editors is long, dull and sordid, and I will deal with it very shortly. He was unscrupulous. He would get an advance on a book and guarantee to deliver it at a certain date; and then, tempted by an offer of quick money, would stop working on it to give another editor or publisher a novel or a story he had written with haste. Actions were brought against him for breach of contract, and the costs and damages he had to pay greatly increased his already heavy debts. For no sooner did success come to him, bringing him contracts for books he was engaged to write (and sometimes never did), than he moved into a spacious apartment, which he furnished at great cost, and bought a cabriolet and a pair of horses. He engaged a groom, a cook and a manservant, bought clothes for himself and a livery for his groom, and quantities of plate that he decorated with a coat of arms which did not belong to him. It was that of an ancient family, by name Balzac d’Entragues, and he assumed it when he added the
de
, the
particule
, to his own name to make believe that he was of noble birth. To pay for all this splendour, he borrowed from his sister, his friends, his publishers, and signed bills that he kept on renewing. His debts increased, but he continued to buy – jewellery, porcelain, cabinets, pieces of buhl, pictures, statues; he had his books bound gorgeously in morocco, and one of his many canes was studded with turquoises. For one dinner he gave, he had his dining-room refurnished and the decoration entirely changed. At intervals, when his creditors were more than usually pressing, many of these possessions were pawned; now and then the brokers came in, seized his furniture, and sold it by public auction. Nothing could cure him. To the end of his life, he went on buying with senseless extravagance. He was a shameless borrower, but so great was the admiration his genius excited that he seldom exhausted the generosity of his
friends. Women are not as a rule willing lenders, but Balzac apparently found them easy. He was completely lacking in delicacy, and there is no sign that he had qualms about taking money from them.

It will be remembered that his mother had cut into her fortune to save him from bankruptcy; the dowries of her two daughters had further reduced her means, and at last the only property she had left was a house she owned in Paris. The time came when she found herself so desperately in need that she wrote a letter to her son, which André Billy quoted in the first edition of his
Vie de Balzac
, and which I shall translate: ‘The last letter I had from you was in November 1834. In it you agreed to give me, from April 1st, 1835, two hundred francs every quarter to help me with my rent and my maid. You understand that I could not live as fitted my poverty; you had made your name too conspicuous and your luxury too obvious for the difference in our situations not to be shocking. Such a promise as you made me was for you, I think, an acknowledged debt. It is now April 1837, which means that you owe me for two years. Of these 1600 francs, you gave me last December 500 francs, as though they were a charity churlishly bestowed. Honoré, for two years my life has been a constant nightmare. You weren’t able to help me, I don’t doubt it, but the result is that the sums I’ve borrowed on my house have diminished its value and now I can raise no more, and everything I have of value is in pawn; and that I’ve at last come to the moment when I have to say to you: “Bread, my son,” For several weeks I’ve been eating what was given me by my good son-in-law, but, Honoré, it can’t go on like that: it seems that you have the means to make long and costly journeys of all sorts, costly in money and in reputation – for yours will be cruelly compromised when you come back because of the contracts you have failed to keep – when I think of all this my heart breaks! My son, as you’ve been able to afford … mistresses, mounted canes,
rings, silver, furniture, your mother may also without indiscretion ask you to carry out your promise. She has waited to do so till the last moment, but it has come …’